Author: Synced

It is no secret that deep neural networks (DNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of complicated tasks. DNN models such as BigGAN, BERT, and GPT 2.0 have proved the high potential of deep learning. Deploying DNNs on mobile devices, consumer devices, drones and vehicles however remains a bottleneck for researchers.

DeepMind’s Research Platform Team has open-sourced TF-Replicator, a framework that enables researchers without previous experience with the distributed system to deploy their TensorFlow models on GPUs and Cloud TPUs. The move aims to strengthen AI research and development.

Model-free reinforcement learning can be used to learn effective strategies for complex tasks such as Atari games, but it usually requires a large amount of interaction, which adds significant time and cost.

For years now, AI researchers have been leveraging game environments to train computer models to react to complicated scenarios and make decisions accordingly. In some ways, the trial-and-error process mimics how children learn about the world around them.

AI-empowered technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly active in the labour-intensive world of call centres — concentrated offices used for sending or receiving a large volume of requests by telephone.

GTC 2019 runs next Monday through Thursday (March 18 — 21), and while we can only speculate what surprises NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang might have in store for us, we can get some sense of where the company is headed by looking at what it’s been up to for the last 12 months.

Last October Stanford University announced plans to create an institute built for artificial intelligence research and development. Today, the school made good on its pledge, launching the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI) with a mission “to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to improve the human condition.”

On Sunday, March 10, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft en route to Nairobi crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes.

Google yesterday announced a new program, Seasons of Docs, that aims to make a substantive contribution to open source software development. The eight-month project will assemble a team of technical writers to work on improving documentation development for various open source projects.

A new GitHub project, PyTorch Geometric (PyG), is attracting attention across the machine learning community. PyG is a geometric deep learning extension library for PyTorch dedicated to processing irregularly structured input data such as graphs, point clouds, and manifolds.

Mask R-CNN (Regional Convolutional Neural Network) has been the state-of-the-art model for object instance segmentation since it was proposed by Facebook Research Scientist Kaiming He in 2017 and won Best Paper at ICCV the same year.

In a move that has surprised many, OpenAI today announced the creation of a new for-profit company to balance its huge expenditures into compute and AI talents. Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator who stepped down last week, has been named CEO of the new “capped-profit” company, OpenAI LP.

The University of California has halted all further subscriptions with one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers, Amsterdam-based Elsevier. The move follows more than six months of negotiations which failed to reach a substantial agreement on securing universal open access to UC research.

Last November Synced ran an interview with Yoshua Bengio, in which the deep learning maverick, Université de Montréal Professor and MILA Scientific Director discussed his research and commented on the current state of deep learning and AI.

TensorFlow is the world’s most popular open source machine learning library. Since its initial release in 2015, the Google Brain product has been downloaded over 41 million times. At this week’s 2019 TensorFlow Dev Summit, Google announced a major upgrade on the framework, the TensorFlow 2.0 Alpha version.

Natural language processing has made significant progress in the past year, but few frameworks focus directly on NLP or sequence modeling. Google Brain recently released Lingvo, a deep learning framework based on TensorFlow. Synced invited Ni Lao, Chief Science Officer at Mosaix, to share his thoughts on Lingvo.

A paper recently accepted for ICLR 2019 challenges this with a novel optimizer — AdaBound — that authors say can train machine learning models “as fast as Adam and as good as SGD.” Basically, AdaBound is an Adam variant that employs dynamic bounds on learning rates to achieve a gradual and smooth transition to SGD.

The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is one of the world’s top computer vision (CV) conferences. CVPR 2019 runs June 15 through June 21 in Long Beach, California, and the list of accepted papers for the prestigious gathering has now been released.

Machine learning models based on deep neural networks have achieved unprecedented performance on many tasks. These models are generally considered to be complex systems and difficult to analyze theoretically. Also, since it’s usually a high-dimensional non-convex loss surface which governs the optimization process, it is very challenging to describe the gradient-based dynamics of these models during training.

Beijing winters can be devastating on feral cats, with studies suggesting only about 40 percent make it through the long stretch of cold and harsh weather. A Baidu AI engineer who goes by the alias “Wan’xi” (晚兮) set out to make a difference for vulnerable neighbourhood kitties, and the result is an AI-powered smart shelter system.

Every year as the calendar turns from February to March, the world’s leading electronics and telecommunications companies, startups, inventors, and a herd of tech journalists and analysts head to the Mobile World Congress.

It’s not uncommon to find scalpers at concert halls and sporting events, hawking admission tickets at inflated prices. Chinese hospitals however have been invaded by a more problematic breed of scalper — those who deal in the appointment registration tokens that hospitals use to process patient visits.

The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) announced this week they have accepted 1300 research papers for CVPR 2019, which will be held June 16 – 20 in Long Beach, California. This year’s submission and acceptance totals both set records for the world’s premier computer vision conference, which had never before accepted more than 1000 papers.

As Synced previously reported, these hyperrealistic images now flooding the Internet come from US chip giant NVIDIA’s StyleGAN, a generative adversarial network based face generator that performs so well that most people can’t distinguish its creations from photos of real people.

Beijing-based AI chip startup Horizon Robotics today announced a staggering US$600 million in Series B funding led by South Korea conglomerate SK Group. The investment brings Horizon’s value to an estimated US$3 billion, making it the world’s highest-valued AI chip startup.

Having notched impressive victories over human professionals in Go, Atari Games, and most recently StarCraft 2 — Google’s DeepMind team has now turned its formidable research efforts to soccer. In a paper released last week, the UK AI company demonstrates a novel machine learning method that trains a team of AI agents to play a simulated version of “the beautiful game.”

Researchers from Beijing-based AI unicorn SenseTime and Nanyang Technological University have trained ImageNet/AlexNet in a record-breaking 1.5 minutes, a significant 2.6 times speedup over the previous record of 4 minutes.